What is the “proper way” to make a walk cycle
You're saying walk cycle. By definition, that's going to be a loop. Cycle = loop. Therefore you're going to have your character walking in one place. Because if he were to leave that place, there would be no loop.

If, on the other hand, you needed to animate a clip of a character walking in some environment, then you would manually place each IK platform on the surfaces, alternating feet and moving the character body around. Except for cases where the character is going in a straight line with constant speed. In that case, you can get away with using a single loop and just moving the body forward. (you can do that by linking the whole armature object to an empty and moving the empty, while applying a Cycle modifier to your walk animation)